My 2 penn'orth; I think the error you're getting is from an attempt to execute the stored proc with a connection that isn't open so you're not seeing the message associated with failing to open the connection in the first place. You need to replace "On Error Resume Next" with "On Error GoTo <some local error handler>. In the error handler, you can check the actual connection failure message which may give you a clue as to what's going on. You could still allow a certain number of failure iterations before giving up entirely.